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The screenwriters, David J Schow and John Shirley, have wisely eighty- sixed the Rimbaud and the leotards, and have added a few desperately needed plot complicatIons. The hero's obses- siveness is still the central idea, but Schow and Shirley are careful not to let the story itself turn into a static, obsessive cycle of self-absorbed grief. The movie is more comic-booky than the comic book, and that's all to the good. The filmmakers have also ex- panded the role of the title bird, exploit- ing its ominous beauty for blessedly nonmetaphoric purposes. ü'Barr's crow simply pops up every now and then to issue a gnomic warning to the hero. The movie's crow swoops all over the city, leading Eric to his prey, and its dreamlike flights over desolate streets help give the picture a gliding, insinu- ating rhythm. Proyas, whose previous experience is in commercials and music videos, has a flamboyantly artificial style that's peculiarly well suited to the pulp-mythic universe of "The Crow." It's an approach designed to sell an image, an aura of desirability, with styl- ized atmosphere, sexy posturing, and visual motifs that flow into each other like the notes of a pop song. With frightening mastery, Proyas fuses all the elements at his command into a coher- ent, smartly packaged vision of roman- tic angst: the urban-hell production de- sign (by Alex McDowell), steeped in the aesthetics of squalor; the editing rhythms, hopped up and frantic in the violent scenes but as languorous as a per- fume commercial's in between; the stark compositions, in which the hero, placed in the evocative ruins, seems to em- body the dead-end glamour of all the wounded loners of American movies, the weary gunslingers who have to clean up the town before we'll let them fade away. It's hokum, but it works. The vil- THE NEW YORKER, MAY 23, 1994 lains-especially the maggoty T - Bird (David Patrick Kelly) and the bored, sadistic aesthete known as Top Dollar (Michael Wincott)-are a vividly loath- some bunch, and the filmmakers have fun inventing a different spectacu- lar death for each of them. The movie's mayhem is, despite its grim context, rather playful; the tone isn't light, exactly, but the director's obvious de- light in his own flashy dexterity gives even the weightiest happenings a kind of mischievous shine. "The Crow" is gloomy existential pulp executed with such berserk conviction that it's actually exhilarating. The mUSIC plays a large part in sus- taining the picture's oddly insistent mo- mentum. The songs are mostly heavy metal (or metal-inflected "alternative" rock): a style that mixes, in a uniquely adolescent way, soaring grandiosity and relentless pessimism-an unholy union of doomy, dissonant chords, lunatic- asylum vocals, and beats that seem as ponderous as the footsteps of the Grim Reaper. You might think that this sort of soundtrack would heighten the op- pressiveness of "The Crow" and rein- force the tendency toward bummed-out monotony that's inherent in the mate- rial-but it doesn't. It clicks so effort- lessly into the picture's morose sensibil- ity that its very aptness becomes a perverse source of pleasure. If you iso- lated anyone of the components of this movie's fantasy world, you might be put off: the unyielding vigilante moral- ity; the death-tripping comic-book ico- nography; the fast, hectic cutting of the action scenes; the queasy sense of dread created by the decaying city and the ugly, vacant-eyed predators who inhabit it; the assaultive sounds of screaming heavy-metal guitars. Yet the combi- nation has a seamless, inevitable aes- thetic coherence that's pleasing in itself; when the jagged power chords mesh with the grunts and gunshots in one elaborate action sequence, you have to laugh at the audacity and the rightness of the effect The darkness of "The Crow" is so complete that it becomes a kind of light. What gives the movie the allure that could make it a pop phenomenon is the performance of Brandon Lee, who In- carnates this gimmicky character so unself-consciously that glum Eric seems like teen-age despair apotheosized-